As part of the “Heckscher at Home” initiative, this program celebrating contemporary artists has been re-envisioned as an Instagram virtual series. The Museum is pleased to announce that Emerging Artists Alisa Shea, Eileen Novack, and Alex Ferrone will be leading a series of Instagram Takeovers of the Museum’s account @heckschermuseum throughout the month of July! The artists will share their work, stories, process, answer questions, and more! Additional program dates for upcoming artists to be announced soon.
July 8: Alisa Shea Alisa was always an artist. Encouraged to be more “practical” in her choice of careers, she took a detour to study occupational therapy and public health before finally landing back to her first love: art. Now working primarily in watercolor, she says: “I paint in watercolor because it scares me. I love its quirky unpredictability. I love the twinge of anxiety I feel every time I put down a color, knowing that I’ve often only got one shot to get it right. Piggybacking on my Instagram addiction, I paint from my own photographic reference material. I typically pick my subjects based on perceived level of difficulty; if it’s something that I’m not sure I can successfully reproduce in watercolor, then that’s the one I want to paint next. I am a control freak, and it’s this combination of subject matter and medium that make for an overachieving, perfectionist’s dream, providing just enough of a challenge to make the whole process a tension-filled whirlwind of creative excitement.” July 15: Eileen Novack Eileen started in photography. She had an extensive darkroom in her parents’ home and spent many hours there honing her craft. She was a budding product/advertising photographer, whose first client paid her with vegetables from their garden. Eileen did eventually find additional clients who did pay in non-vegetable currency. She also participated in a group show at a New York City gallery with work involving Kodachrome slide manipulation. When a fire destroyed most of her work, she decided to pursue other career paths and spent many years in the software world. In 2012, she found renewed interest in photography and started working with digital imaging. “I have been influenced by a lifetime of being bombarded with images. Advertising has affected us all and it is certainly one of my main influences and inspirations,” she said. July 22: Alex Ferrone Aerial photographer Alex Ferrone explores her environment from different (and very high) vantage points. “Photographing from a helicopter, draws me to the genuine designs within the vast landscapes over which I fly. Generally excluding representational elements from my photographs, leaves viewers little or no reference to reality, excites their imagination and interpretation, and challenges their perception of light, shape and form,” she notes. “My images disconnect viewers from present technology as they are not created within the realm of digital design manipulation. Leaving daily discord behind, the viewer is engaged to contemplate the tranquility of nature as they meditate on the forms, texture and colors within the scene. At the same time, a new awareness and appreciation for our fragile ecological systems may be created for them.” See complete Emerging Artists Line-up for 2020
